Queer Gaze is a monthly column where Prathyush Parasuraman examines traces of queerness in cinema and streaming — intended or unintended, studied or unstudied, reckless or exciting.
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The kink of whipping your lover, the eros of undressing their feverish bodies, the intensity of feeling — both love and hate — between the leading men in RRR lends itself effortlessly to a queer reading of the homosocial as the homosexual. Perhaps, the two men, Ram Charan as Rama Raju and Jr NTR as Bheem, should have just had sex.
Films drumming masculinity and muscularity to the point of feminine redundance offer themselves as willing, submissive bodies to a queer perspective, like the Kannada gangster film Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahanam, like the Hindi bromance War, and the Tamil tickle-trickster film Kadaseela Biriyani.
There is no space for the feminine, elbowed out as it is by the male gayze. Both Ram Raju and Bheem are given female lovers as narrative charity, each woman burdened by an insurmountable distance — with Sita (Alia Bhatt), it is literal, and with Jenny (Olivia Morris), it is linguistic; they do not share the same space or the same language.
All the markers of the traditional love story are, instead, given to the men — a meet cute, a musical interlude intensifying affection, the exchange of a protective thread, a conflict, a chasm, a reunion. This is SS Rajamouli’s sensibility, tapping into the familiar — the myths we have heard, the templates of storytelling which we have assumed as the contours of life — but wrapping it in the heightened outrance of drama that it feels like whatever you are watching, you are watching for the first time. Like he is inventing cinema and cinematic awe, desire, and desirability.
A thought experiment, then. If the two men actually had sex, would that have made the film more queer?
Catherine M in her book The Sexual Life Of Catherine M, where she impersonally narrates her prolific sexual life, from gang bangs in Italy to orgies in Paris, notes, “To have sexual relations and to feel desire (are) almost two separate activities.” In that case, there is queerness with respect to desire, and there is queerness with respect to the act of sex. With RRR tapping — quite insistently — into the former, it would not, I presume, make the desire between them more or less queer if they actually had sex. You do not necessarily have to be queer if you are coded as queer, anyway. The sex itself is irrelevant in this case, then.
This insistent erotic queerness in a violent film is not surprising. There is, Sigmund Freud suggests, a relationship between sex and violence, a connecting thread between the pleasures from pummeling — on the streets, between the sheets. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, expresses this relationship most explicitly with the French word 'jouissance.' Simply put, it is pleasure. Jouir is French for coming, the zenith of sex. But for Lacan, jouissance is that moment beyond the threshold of pleasure, when pleasure becomes pain.
In RRR, too, pain is intimately linked to pleasure — when a snake sting causes Bheem to undress Rama Raju’s convulsing body, when Rama Raju gets to whip Bheem whose knees refuse to scrape the ground, when they exhaust themselves doing the 'Naatu Naatu,' when they jump off a bridge together tethered to two ends of a rope, slide onto each other’s shoulders when the other’s knees are weak.
Any pleasure this film gives its characters must travel through pain first, a relationship that is best expressed in queer cinema, through the pain of anal sex (LOEV), the lingering question of disease in a stray moment of flooded eros (Theo And Hugo), the veneer of isolation in an act for two (Firebird), the bubbling threat in cruising (Stranger By The Lake), what queer critic Leo Bersani describes thus, “The greatest human happiness is exactly identical to the greatest human unhappiness.”
Now, you may very well wonder why do we need queer readings in this time and age, when we are slowly creating a steady trickle of intentionally, consummately queer films — films from which you do not have to extract queerness like I am doing with RRR? It is a fair question, for such readings can produce the same fatigue that an over-eager telescoping does.
But what if the queer spectator is looking for revenge, and that is the source for these queer readings of apparently straight films?
For history has intentionally, explicitly kept queerness out of its records. Queerness, then, had to slip between the cracks as subtext, with subtlety.
Take Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) where the line — intentionally placed, might I add, given the gay writer of the film — “You’re quite a good chicken-strangler, as I recall” to get past the throttling production code (‘Choking the chicken’ is slang for male masturbation). Queerness survived cinema of this suppressive period only through a sleight of hand.
Take, also, the Jamali Kamali mosque and tomb in Delhi. Jamali is a Persian Sufi poet who died in 1536. Of Kamali, however, little is known. They are buried together — with Jamali’s grave having a pen box on top denoting the pen with which he wrote, a common architectural motif among male saints, while Kamali’s grave is flat on top, like those housing women, representative of the paper on which the pen wielded its eloquence. The alignment of the graves is unlike that of a pir-murad, more similar to those buried as lovers. Described as the “gay Taj Mahal” — the gate to enter the courtyard with the tomb is locked now, only given access to “ASI types” — local lore calls Jamali and Kamali lovers. The ASI board outside the mosque, however, brusquely notes, “(Kamali’s) identity is unknown.” That’s it.
So when authors like Hoshang Merchant looks at Dosti (1964), Anand (1971), and Sholay (1975) as queer films, part of it comes from an urge to elbow oneself into the dance floor of history, famously devoid of explicit queer presence.
But today, when queerness has been folded into the culture, almost to a fault reproducing the same inequities and indignities of heterosexuality, does a queer reading do anything? Should a queer reading do anything, except assert its observations, and revel in desire, intended or distended. Should it see in macho masculinity not what they want you to see — men as men — but what you I want to see — men on men?
RRR is playing in cinemas.
Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at prathyush.substack.com.
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